Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"What goes up must come down
Spinning wheel got to go 'round"
--Blood, Sweat & Tears

"Kat and I tracked Salim's capsule as it made its orbit. When it reached its highest point, we both said, 'NOW!' at the same time and Kat laughed and I joined in. That's how we knew we'd been tracking the right one. We saw the people bunch up as the capsule came back down, facing northeast towards the automatic camera for the souvenir photograph. They were just dark bits of jackets, legs, dresses, and sleeves.
"Then the capsule landed. The doors opened and the passengers came out in twos and threes. They walked off in different directions. Their faces were smiling. Their paths never crossed again.
"But Salim wasn't among them.
"We waited for the next capsule and the next and the one after that. He still didn't appear. Somewhere, somehow, in the thirty minutes of riding the Eye, in his sealed capsule, he had vanished off the face of the earth. This is how having a funny brain that runs on a different operating system from other people's helped me to figure out what had happened."

Twelve-year-old Ted's mind does not process like that of the typical person. He is wired in a fashion that causes him to be "very good at thinking about facts and how things work." He is a young man with an obsession with and excellent understanding of weather and weather patterns.

Ted and Kat's cousin Salim and their Aunt Gloria have come visiting them in London, having given up their home in Manchester in preparation for a move to New York City. Ted hasn't seen the likeable Salim in years. When asked what he'd like to do, Salim, who loves a good view, opts for experiencing a spin on the London Eye. Then, when a random stranger offers them a free ticket, Salim snags the freebie, leaves his cousins standing in the lengthy ticket line, boards the Eye, and disappears.

Ted has a "syndrome" that makes it difficult for him to recognize body language, makes it difficult to cope with others touching him, and often causes him to take what is said literally: "He and Aunt Gloria walked up to our front door through our front garden, which Mum says is the size of a postage stamp. In fact, it's three metres by five and I once worked out that it could fit 22,500 stamps."

Nevertheless, Ted -- whose theories and questions are generally ignored by most of the adults around him -- uses his unusually-wired mind to examine the facts from all possible angles in his quest to solve the London Eye Mystery.

"The inspector looked at me without saying anything. The corners of her lips turned up, which meant she was slightly amused. Then she tapped her nose with her interlocked fingers. 'So,' she said. 'You'd allow for a margin of error?'
"'Only a small one,' I said. 'Two per cent.'
"'Two per cent?'
"'In every human observation,' I explained, 'there is a margin of error. This is because our senses are not foolproof. In fact, some people believe that one hundred per cent certainty is impossible to achieve.' I stopped and put my head on one side. 'As humans, we cannot even be sure that the sun will rise the next day. Our assumption that it will do so is arrived at by a process of induction. This is a process where probability based on past observation allows us to predict things like weather patterns--'"

"Walking thru that door
Outside we came
Nowhere at all
Perhaps the answers here
Not there anymore" -- Moody Blues, "House of Four Doors"

THE LONDON EYE MYSTERY is so much fun! Ted is such an engaging and endearing narrator, and it is so interesting to follow his lines of reasoning as we, as readers, try to catch a dropped clue that will give us an edge over the book's characters in figuring out what has actually befallen Salim. This book will surely cause readers to consider with newfound respect those classmates and friends who are wired differently -- and will certainly have some readers thinking about the weather.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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